I know you got soul: machines with that certain something Page 6

  This is beginning to make space travel in the vicinity of earth extremely hazardous. The Shuttle recently hit a paint chip, which doesn’t sound like the end of the world, but because of the speeds involved the tiny particle blew a hole halfway through one of its windows. More recently the French-made satellite Cerise was destroyed when it crashed into a piece of debris.

  Then there’s the bothersome business of all this rubbish coming back down to earth. It’s estimated that in 1999 nearly half a million pounds of junk re-entered the atmosphere. 84,000 lbs survived the heat and, because 25 per cent of the earth’s surface is land, we can deduce that 21,000 lbs didn’t fall harmlessly into the sea.

  In the eighties the Canadians had a bust-up with the Russians over large chunks of radioactive space waste that landed in the Northern Wilderness. And the Australian government charged NASA with littering after Skylab crash-landed in the outback.

  It’s all a far cry from the system of space communication dreamed up by the then-unknown science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Back in 1945, in a paper called ‘Extra-Terrestrial Relays’, he suggested that three satellites positioned 22,000 miles from earth would mean the whole planet could be linked.

  It was a wonderful piece of speculation, especially since there was no way, back then, of reaching even five feet into space. Rocketry was limited to a handful of British geeks, who understood it only in theory, and the Nazi V2s, which had a job reaching England, leave alone the heavens.

  So how Clarke thought his satellites could be taken to their carefully chosen mooring spots 22,000 miles away, God only knows.

  Actually, that’s not true. Today it isn’t only God that knows. Anyone with access to the internet can find out as well. The thing is, though, it’s a bit complicated. It really is rocket science.

  You see, in order to break free of the earth’s atmosphere you need to achieve a speed of 8 km per second. That’s 17,500 mph. And that’s pretty fast.

  At this speed your forward momentum exactly balances the downward gravitational acceleration so you achieve orbit. Fine, but it will be a low orbit, just a few miles up, and you will still be battling traces of friction from the atmosphere. In time, a few months maybe, your expensive satellite will start to slow down, and when that happens the people on earth had better stay indoors because it’s going to start raining steel…

  What you need is a huge rocket capable of getting you up to 17,500 mph and then, when you’re cruising round the world, another rocket to take you far, far away.

  22,000 miles, as Clarke predicted, is perfect because here the satellite has a huge view of earth – it can therefore beam its pictures or information to a wide area – and what’s more, for mathematical and scientific reasons I simply don’t understand, its speed can be perfectly matched to the rotation of the earth. Think. The dish that brings Jo Guest into your sitting room is pointing at a satellite that’s howling through space at thousands of miles per hour, but from your point of view on earth it’s always in the same place.

  This is handy. Imagine how annoying it would be if Jo were just about to remove her top when the satellite moved. You’d have to go outside with a ladder to wave your dish about until you found it again.

  Of course, pumping geo-stationary satellites into space today is a piece of cake. Even the French can do it. But back in the early days it wasn’t even remotely possible.

  The Russians were the first to get up there with Sputnik. It was little more than a radio beacon, screaming round the world beeping.

  The Americans were next. A huge mirror called Echo was sent up there, just getting out of the atmosphere where it reflected radio signals back to earth.

  The first proper satellite that could receive a signal, amplify it and then send it back to the other side of the earth was launched on 10 July 1962. It was called Telstar, and the Queen, in her Christmas message that year, called it ‘the invisible focus of a million eyes’.

  It was a remarkable advance for humankind. A true triumph. Because it was high enough to see America and Europe at the same time events in New York could be beamed, live through space, to sitting rooms in Britain and France.

  Well, that was the theory. But Telstar did not sit at the same place over the earth. The Delta rocket that took it into space was simply not powerful enough for that, so it rose and set like the moon, the sun and all the other stars… only a lot faster. It would only be visible from Britain for 40 minutes and then you had to wait two and a half hours for it to go all the way round the world and come back again.

  You needed to hope, then, that the sporting event it was capturing as it flew over America didn’t go into extra time.

  And that was just the start of the problems. The really big one was trying to track and lock on to what was nothing more than an electronic beach ball that was 2,000 miles away, doing 14,000 mph.

  Britain took up the challenge, and just before Telstar was launched opened a ground station at a place called Goonhilly on the Lizard Point in Cornwall. The Lizard was ideal, partly because it’s as far south as you can go in Britain, which eked out the maximum time Telstar would be visible, but also because the rock down there is super-stable. Any tremor, any movement at all, and the whole project would be dead in the water.

  Nevertheless, the ground station worked. Telstar worked. And on 11 July 1962 Britain heard Alistair Cooke live, via the heavens, from New York. Just seventeen years after Arthur C. Clarke had predicted such a thing the age of space communication was upon us.

  For many, the hero of the piece is Telstar and for sure there was much sadness when, a year later, it caught radiation sickness and died. But actually, my favourite link in the chain is Arthur, the huge satellite dish that was built in Cornwall to follow the satellite’s progress.

  He was the first open satellite dish in the world and he was a leviathan. But of course he had to be 30 metres in diameter if he was to stand a chance of pinpointing that pinprick in the sky. He also had to be fast, and he was. He may have weighed 1,180 tons but he could turn a complete circle in three minutes while moving from the horizontal through 90 degrees to the vertical.

  What on earth must people have thought when he was unveiled? This huge white saucer, supported on a latticework of girders, tracking an invisible object in the sky so we in Britain could see what was going on in America… right now. He must have seemed like science fiction.

  But he wasn’t. And even more astonishingly, despite the advances in telecommunications these last 50 years, he isn’t ancient history either.

  Certainly, visitors to Goonhilly shouldn’t mistake his lack of movement for inactivity. Nowadays he doesn’t have to swivel his hips because the roving Telstar has been replaced by Intelsat 903, which does him the service of sitting still, right above the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Sure, Arthur has been joined over the years by a host of other dishes, all of whom are named after characters from Camelot but the king himself is still very much alive and well. In fact he is now part of the biggest machine in the world, the web of communication that spreads from below the seabed to solar-powered satellites in deep space. As a result in a normal day he can expect to handle all the banking transactions from the Caribbean, people holding for 0898 girls in California, news from New Zealand, most of the phone calls between Britain and America, and the Indian internet.

  Arthur dealt smoothly with all the military radio traffic in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by firing up his motors and pointing to a new satellite he even stood in for America’s wounded communications network on 11 September 2001.

  Not bad for a machine that was originally designed in the fifties to deal with one television signal or 600 phone calls. But not both at the same time.

  What is bad is the state of him. I’ve been to all sorts of engineering sites in America. The Ames wind tunnel in California. The Stennis rocket plant in Louisiana. And, of course, Cape Canaveral in Florida. These places are just as old as Goonhilly but they’re obviously well maintained and
nurtured so they look like they were built yesterday.

  Arthur, on the other hand, is streaked with rust and the little room behind that pointy thing in the middle of his dish looks like the storeroom at a builders’ merchant.

  What they’re asking of him is no different from asking Jack Charlton to play for England. That Arthur can do it, and does, is testimony to the brilliance of the men who designed and built him all those years ago.

  That’s the thing about Big Art. He knows what the weather will be like before Michael Fish. He knows how much you spent on ice creams last time you went to St Lucia. He knows what sort of pornography they like in India. And he knows about your mistress in New Jersey. It’s probably not that far from the truth to say that these days Arthur knows more about the workings of our world than God.

  747

  At lunchtime on 27 March 1977 a terrorist bomb exploded at Las Palmas airport in the Canary Islands. And since there were threats of more bombs in the terminal building, all incoming flights were diverted to the islands’ other airport at Los Rodeos.

  One of the first to land there was Captain Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten, aboard a KLM Jumbo. He’d been with the airline for 30 years and was responsible for training other Dutch pilots.

  He was ordered by air traffic control to park his 747 on one of the taxiways and wait for Las Palmas to reopen. Suspecting that it might not take long, he initially refused to let the passengers off because then they’d have to be reloaded, and by the time he actually got them to the right place his permitted time in the cockpit would be up, and he’d be unable to fly back to Holland. He was so worried about time, in fact, that he asked for the plane to be refuelled while it was parked. This would mean he would have no need to top up the tanks at Las Palmas.

  Meanwhile the airport was filling up with other planes, including a Pan Am Jumbo that was bringing a party of old people from Los Angeles to meet their cruise ship in the Canaries. This was being flown by Captain Victor Grubbs, a 57-year-old with 21,000 flying hours under his belt.

  His plane was pretty special too, since it was the Clipper Victor, the first Jumbo ever to fly with passengers on board. If you watch the news-reel footage of that first flight, from New York to London on 21 January 1970, this is the plane you will see. And now, seven years later, it was bumbling around a small airport in the middle of the Atlantic looking for somewhere to park.

  When Las Palmas finally reopened the Pan Am plane was boxed in by van Zanten’s KLM plane and its refuelling tanker. The crew actually paced out the gap but figured that while it was close, they’d probably be better off waiting for the Dutch jet to move first.

  By the time its tanks were full, at 4.26 in the afternoon, fog had settled on the airport like a big damp blanket and visibility was down to just 300 metres.

  Nevertheless, the KLM jet was ordered to taxi down Runway 30 and wait at the far end for clearance to go. Meanwhile the Pan Am plane was ordered onto Runway 30, and to pull off at the third taxiway and wait until the Dutch plane had gone. At this point the fog was so bad that the air traffic controller couldn’t see the planes, the Dutch couldn’t see the Americans and the Americans weren’t sure where they were supposed to be going.

  Flight-deck recordings show confusion in the cockpit. The first officer thought he’d been asked to pull off on the first taxiway – impossible since it was a logjam of parked planes. This time the controller was clear: ‘The third one, sir. One, two, three. Third one.’

  By the time the confusion was cleared up the Americans, still trundling in the pea-souper towards the stationary KLM plane, had no idea how many taxiway turn-off points they’d passed. The black box recorded the captain and first officer trying to decide which was their turn-off. In the event they had missed the third taxiway and were heading for the fourth, all the while getting nearer and nearer to van Zanten.

  He, in the meantime, had turned his plane around and was desperate to get going. So desperate, in fact, that he immediately opened the taps on the four engines. First Officer Klaus Meurs plainly sensed this was premature, since he was recorded saying, ‘Wait. We don’t have clearance.’

  Van Zanten immediately applied the brakes and asked his first officer to get on the radio and get clearance. This is what the air traffic controller said: ‘KL4805. You are cleared to the Papa beacon. Climb to and maintain Flight Level 90. Right turn after take-off. Proceed with heading 040 until intercepting the 325 radial from Las Palmas VOR.’

  These instructions were directions for after the plane had taken off. At no point did the controller actually say they were cleared to go. But van Zanten didn’t realise that and released the brakes.

  As the plane began to move, towards the unseen Pan Am Jumbo, his first officer repeated the message, as is customary. ‘Roger, sir, we are cleared to the Papa beacon, Flight Level 90 until intercepting the 325. We’re now at take-off.’

  And again there was confusion. The controller took ‘we’re now at take-off’ to mean that they were at the take-off position, not that they were actually accelerating at full tilt down the runway towards the Clipper Victor.

  On board the Dutch jet were 14 crew and 234 passengers, including 48 children and 3 babies. On board the Pan Am jet there were 16 crew and 396 passengers. That’s a total of 660 people. And they were on a collision course.

  As the KLM jet picked up speed its flight officer, Willem Schreuder, heard the tower ask the Pan Am crew to report when they’d cleared the runway.

  Assuming, incorrectly, that his captain had heard this too, he said, ‘Did he not clear the runway then?’

  The reply sealed everyone’s fate. ‘Oh yes,’ said van Zanten.

  On board the Pan Am plane the first officer was the first to see the KLM jet bearing down on them. ‘There he is,’ he shouted. ‘Look at him. Goddam. That son of a bitch is coming. Get off. Get off. Get off.’

  Captain Grubbs was trying. He slammed the throttles wide open but it was too late. At the last moment van Zanten had spotted the Clipper and had tried to get airborne. He made it too but not quite enough; the bottom of his plane hit the roof of the American jet. It burst into flames and smashed back into the runway. Everyone on board was killed instantly.

  Aboard the Clipper the first officer reached up after the impact to shut down the howling engines, but the roof on which the switches were located had gone. So too had most of his passengers, in the initial explosion. But miraculously 70 people were pulled out alive, including all the crew of the flight deck.

  The total death toll, after nine had died in hospital, was 583, making this the worst accident in the 100-year history of aviation. And therein lies the biggest problem with the 747. When one of them goes down the loss of life is always so horrific no one gives a stuff about the plane itself.

  Happily, however, very few are lost. Between 1970 and 2000 1,000 Jumbos were wheeled out of Boeing’s factory and only 28 have been written off in accidents.

  Seven of those accidents happened on the ground while the plane was being manoeuvred, four were down to terrorists, one was destroyed by shelling in the first Gulf War and one was shot down in error by the Russians. So, of the 1,000 made only fifteen have been lost in genuine accidents. And most of those were down to human error.

  To get an idea of how tough a Jumbo is, look at that photograph of the decapitated nose cone lying in a field outside Lockerbie. One of the windows is still intact.

  To give you a better idea, let me take you back to the first ever ‘incident’ on a commercial flight. It was 1971, and for all sorts of reasons a 747 was trying to take off with too much weight from a runway at San Francisco that was too short. As it reached 165 knots it ploughed into a timber pier that ran from the end of the runway into the sea.

  The steel gantries ripped through the cabin floor, destroyed the wing flaps, bent the landing gear and shattered the bulkheads. Wooden shards scythed through the tail, and through the cabin too, amputating the legs of one passenger and crushing the arm of another. But somehow
the pilot managed to get the plane airborne. And even more somehow he managed to land it again. And not a single person was killed.

  As a piece of design the 747 is astonishing. I mean, when the TWA Jumbo exploded shortly after leaving New York in July 1996 people assumed it must have been hit by a stray missile or a giant meteorite. The notion that a 747 had actually ‘gone wrong’ in some way was just too preposterous.

  Actually, I still think it is preposterous. I mean, when you examine all the evidence it does look like it was blown out of the sky by someone – the US Navy was operating nearby and the Americans, let’s be honest, are no strangers to the concept of friendly fire. Whatever, the US authorities say the central fuel tank exploded and, hey, these guys never lie so there you have it.

  Whatever, safety is not the thing that makes the 747 stand out. The modern jet engine is now so reliable, and the on-board computers so foolproof, that all commercial airliners have a safety record that makes granite look tricky and unstable. The fact is that if you flew on a plane every day, statistically it would be 13,000 years before you hit the ground in a big fireball.

  Nor, actually, am I drawn to the Jumbo because of its speed, though God knows it’s still the jackrabbit of the skies. The newer 777 cruises at 565 mph. The 747 is a full 20 mph faster and, over 11,000 miles, that makes a big difference to your deep-vein thrombosis.